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The real crisis is about a conservative economic agenda whose anti-government extremism is making the path to a degree and a decent job even tougher.

Say what you will about this era’s Republican presidential candidates, they at least have chutzpah.

Millionaire blue-blood George W. Bush pretended to be a down-home cowboy. Two-time divorcee and longtime Washington influence peddler Newt Gingrich struts around preaching about traditional family values and insisting he’s a D.C. outsider. Now, topping them all is Rick Santorum, who last week declared that only “snobs” support efforts to make a college education more accessible to all Americans.

Santorum, of course, has not one, not two, but a whopping three separate degrees, two of which come from public universities—that is, two that were taxpayer-subsidized, courtesy of the “Big Government” Santorum now claims to loathe.

Hypocritical–and dare I say, snobbish–as it is for someone with such a pedigree to attack President Obama’s college affordability initiatives, Santorum did inadvertently stumble into a significant question: Is higher education for everyone? The answer today is not necessarily, but that’s precisely because of the affordability problem Obama aims to solve.

N+1 magazine notes that since the late 1970s, when Santorum was enjoying his taxpayer-subsidized higher education, “the price of tuition at U.S. colleges has increased over 900 percent.” In 2011, that meant the average total cost of a year at a public university was $21,477, up 5.4 percent in just 12 months. Thanks to cuts to programs that make college and vocational education more affordable–cuts Santorum supported in Congress–those tuition increases promise to get even steeper in the coming years, all but ensuring that a future college student will have even more than the $25,250 in education debt that today’s average student carries.

With higher education this unaffordable but with most decent-paying jobs in our economy still requiring a degree, the trends have created another bubble scenario. Those lucky enough to get a job out of school can barely pay back their now-massive loans, and those left jobless in the recession can’t pay back their loans at all, leaving us facing the potential of mass defaults and yet another financial meltdown.

Not surprisingly, this frightening situation has initiated a debate over whether college remains a good investment. Most of the data say that on average it still is–that the money typically spent on higher education is made back in comparatively higher wages during a career. However, that data is less clear than it once was, and that typical experience is no longer such a guarantee. Indeed, there are more and more situations where college might not be such a solid financial investment–not because it’s wrong for a particular student’s interests, but because the economics of tuition prices and the anemic job market make it too risky a gamble.

Those economics are an obvious symptom of a larger crisis involving all sorts of cuts–revenue-draining tax cuts, cuts to education budgets and cuts to public programs that sustain decent jobs. But because any critical discussion of those policies offends the GOP’s corporate financiers, Santorum is trying to define the crisis on unrelated, culture-war terms. He would have us believe the emergency is about “snobbery” from Democrats arrogantly pressuring Americans to get degrees. In this, he gets a two-fer: he can both avoid tough issues and pander to the anti-intellectual, anti-elitist sensibilities of Republican primary voters.

As the facts prove, though, the real crisis is about a conservative economic agenda whose anti-government extremism is making the path to a degree and a decent job even tougher than it naturally is during tough times.

Trying to make that path just a tad easier—like it was when Santorum got his three degrees—isn’t snobbery. It’s the opposite.

David Sirota, an In These Times senior editor and syndicated columnist, is a staff writer at PandoDaily and a bestselling author whose book Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now—Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything was released in 2011. Sirota, whose previous books include The Uprising and Hostile Takeover, co-hosts "The Rundown" on AM630 KHOW in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.

You have to stop and ask yourself what a college education is actually preparing you for, and that is to work in management. Why would anyone want to take a job as a “whipping person” for a corporate CEO? Just look around you, all of the "nickel-and-diming" business models are predicated on a low wage non-union workforce, for the most part, when viewed nationally. And anybody who does not “get with the program” is deemed to be unemployable, or is kept on the fringes of life. College dropouts, or college graduates with the “wrong”, (read “unmarketable’), degree, face the same economic existence as “the rest of us”, forced to fill out 25 page psychological surveys to get a job at the checkout line. We are in the proverbial race to the bottom, and no amount of slashing and hacking at your competitors in an effort to secure employment will change our collective situation. Posted by Staten Island Bob on 2012-04-20 05:58:09

Alas, it is not all about government. I have not yet seen a shred of evidence suggesting the feasibility of any federal policy initiative that would make a meaningful dent in affordability. It’s an institutional, not fundamentally a governmental, problem. The wrenching changes higher education will inevitably have to endure will result from the forces of supply and demand as they smash into the industry’s high cost “production function”.
Your author would like to place this problem at Santorum’s feet, by arguing that his cuts to vocational training are just the thing that created this big mess. But surely that is trifling compared with the institutional run-up in costs that is a much more entrenched and long-standing phenomenon. Indeed, an argument can be made that federal subsidies have helped blow up this very balloon. legal steroidsPosted by Busta on 2012-03-21 14:34:09

Quote:
"Rick Santorum thinks making college affordable for all is elitist. How else are Americans going to find good-paying jobs?"
Respectfully, this is total nonsense: is everyone going to have a good paying job ?
who is going to do the min wage stuff that now gets done ?
I guess you could argue that per capita income is about 40K, so if ALL of the rich people gave up ALL of hteir money, everyone could have a 40K job.
But, there are a lot of jobs that now, and for the future, are gonna pay min wage - how is a college degree gonna help someone flippin burgers at macdonalds
I just don't see the basic arithmetic adding up here, but maybe Dr Sirota has some ideas.Posted by ezra abrams on 2012-03-06 17:56:18

A college education works out great, for those who actually graduate. Given that college graduation rates are probably somewhere between 40-60% (See the recent chronicle.com article for more details), about half of students are being seriously hurt by a college education. However, the liberal arts focus of a college education is not necessarily right for many students, just as much as a college preparatory system at the high school level is inappropriate as well.
To say that college should be universal rather than fixing our high school system isn't snobbery, it a staggering waste of resources. We should be graduating high school students who are ready for the workforce. There's no need to waste four more years of those students lives. Of course, Obama doesn't want to touch the high school system. That would piss off his union friends. So we are left with a failing high school system and a desire to replicate that model at the higher education level. And the Republicans can't even focus on that rather than some vague notion of "elitism". It's just pathetic on all sides.Posted by High Gamma on 2012-03-06 16:11:59

Santorum conflated college affordability with liberal elitism as a cheap shot?
Check, got it.
But your author then goes on into trickier territory.
First is the near-assertion that the reason (the only reason? the main reason?) college is not for all is simply that it is unaffordable. But that can't be true, can it, really? Granted Obama himself, in his statement, stretched the term to include community college and even plain old vocational training, and good for that. But too many commentators--your author included, it seems--go for the more straightforward notion that college--real college--*should* be universal, and it is the job of liberals to make it so.
I don't agree. Especially in its current form, college does not, and cannot, be a universal salve. We rightfully rush to emphasize the need to educate "symbolic" types to populate the upper reaches of the 21st century economy. But not all are gifted in that department. What about hands? What about the simple distribution of the kinds of intelligence that support book learning? Is it doing these people favors to expect them to benefit from four years of college in its current form? I think not.
Second is your author's seeming presumption that the affordability problem is able to be solved via any program Obama, or the government, is likely to cook up ("Is higher education for everyone? The answer today is not necessarily, but that’s precisely because of the affordability problem Obama aims to solve").
Alas, it is not all about government. I have not yet seen a shred of evidence suggesting the feasibility of any federal policy initiative that would make a meaningful dent in affordability. It's an institutional, not fundamentally a governmental, problem. The wrenching changes higher education will inevitably have to endure will result from the forces of supply and demand as they smash into the industry's high cost "production function".
Your author would like to place this problem at Santorum's feet, by arguing that his cuts to vocational training are just the thing that created this big mess. But surely that is trifling compared with the institutional run-up in costs that is a much more entrenched and long-standing phenomenon. Indeed, an argument can be made that federal subsidies have helped blow up this very balloon.
I will give it to your author that he knows it is not all peaches and cream. He acknowledges there is something of a bubble, and that the value proposition is increasingly a marginal one. Oddly enough, though, this line of thinking is eerily reminiscent of Santorum's own skepticism, shorn of its anti-elitist harangue. But maybe it's not so odd . . . I am sure your reporter could never never take the position that Santorum is on to something, even a little something.Posted by Fens Moop on 2012-03-06 15:19:04

Just one tweak to the argument here--
Santorum's Bachelors and MBA are from Penn State and Pitt, which are NOT "public" universities. They're two of four universities (along with Temple and Lincoln) we call "state-related," which means they're private/public hybrids. They get more state money than, say, Penn or Drexel or Carnegie Mellon, but they're not managed by the state anywhere near as thoroughly as the State System schools.
I teach at one of the fourteen state-owned campuses, and this conflation is a big problem for us in terms of lobbying/PR/negotiations. The state-related institutions are more research-intensive than ours are and have grad students teaching lots of lower-division/gen-ed courses--which enables our opponents to call out "lazy professors." The state-relateds can raise tuition however much they want while we can't; the conflation allows our Governor and others to accuse us of being fiscally irresponsible. That is to say, our Governor's effort to privatize all things public benefits from the kind of strawman arguments that this confusion invites him to make.
I realize for your purposes the distinction isn't crucial; your point is that Santorum would deny other people access to the same subsidized education he got. And I fully agree. Posted by Seth Kahn on 2012-03-03 07:13:58